| Title | : | Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete |
| Platforms | : | Sony PlayStation |
| Publisher | : | Working Designs |
| ESRB Rating | : | Teen |
| Game Rating | : | 9.6 |
| Review by | : | Robert Boyd |
Imagine a world where magic is real and your best friend is a flying cat. Imagine a world where brave dragonmasters protect the Goddess Althena from the forces of evil. Imagine a world that basks in the light of the Blue Star, the original home of humanity. Experience the world of Lunar.
Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete is an update to an RPG classic that originally appeared on the Sega CD. Every aspect of the game has been drastically changed and upgraded for the better. Graphics, while technologically unsophisticated, look good nevertheless and the music, while missing some good songs from the original, is excellent. High quality anime movie sequences highlight and intensify critical story points and generally good dubbing helps to bring the characters alive.
Gameplay is traditional and well done. Encounters can be avoided or sought out based on your preference and dexterity, which makes exploration more enjoyable than usual. In battles, a unique positioning system makes combat more strategic than in most games. Spells, though limited in number, are effective throughout the game. The game fully supports the dual analog shock controller — odd for an RPG, yet nice. And bosses provide a fun challenge — hard enough to be enjoyable, but not so hard that they become a chore.
But the real heart of Lunar Complete is in its characters and dialogue. Working Designs' translation of Lunar is probably the best translation ever created for a video game — the dialogue is naturally spoken, well written, and often quite funny. The amount of text in the game boggles the mind; simple townsfolk may have as many as a dozen different things to say to you based on when you talk to them and who is in your party. Because of the high quality and quantity of the text, the characters in Lunar feel like real and complex people, and at the end of the game, most players will feel like they're saying goodbye to good friends, not merely finishing a fun video game. It's this emotional bond that the game creates that truly elevates Lunar to classic status.
In addition to the game, Lunar Complete comes with the biggest set of extras ever seen in a video game package. The game comes with a cloth map, an exceptional instruction book (over 100 pages, full color, and made with high quality materials), a fun "Making of Lunar" movie CD, and a music CD. The cloth map isn't especially useful or pretty, but the other extras are highly enjoyable and really make one wish that other companies would include similar extras with their games.
Lunar is somewhat short for an RPG (most players will finish it in about 30 hours) and is more expensive than most CD games (because of the extras), but despite these two facts, Lunar Complete is probably the best RPG currently available on the Sony PlayStation. Everyone who loves a good story deserves to spend some quality time in the world of Lunar.
This article is copyright (c) 1999, 2007 by Ken Gagne. All rights reserved. Not to be distributed without permission.
Original publication: Sentinel & Enterprise, 26-Jul-99